


contrary views on the main question

by fitzroysquare



Series: in my defense, i have none [2]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Character Study, Microaggresions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29293686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzroysquare/pseuds/fitzroysquare
Summary: The Turing test is a determinant of consciousness and personhood. It’s also a test Tosh finds herself having to pass multiple times throughout her life.
Series: in my defense, i have none [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2098842
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11





	contrary views on the main question

**Author's Note:**

> beta-read by [princessoftheworlds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds)! (thank youuu)
> 
> title taken from a subsection heading of Alan Turing’s Can Machines Think
> 
> In this paper, Turing proposes what he calls the Turing Test (also known as the imitation game), which is a guide to determine whether AI/computers can exhibit intelligence indistinguishable from a human.
> 
> In programming, “//” is used to signal a single line comment outside of the greater code

_// this is a test for consciousness_  
_// let’s begin_

Although Tosh grows up amongst the towering skyscrapers of a city, it’s not until she moves back to London at the age of twelve and walks the streets of her place of birth that she begins to recognize that there’s something of a cavity inside of her - a ravenous, hollow hunger carving itself deep in her bones and growing bigger by the day. And for all of her perfect grades and natural intellect, she finds it impossible to calculate its origins or decode its meaning. All she knows is that it’s there, coming at her from all directions - her mind, her heart, and her stomach - eating away at the sinew of her flesh until the emptiness is a constant weight dragging her guts and bones down into the pavement. She doesn’t want to end up this way, a mess of blood and guts on the ground, but despite her best efforts, she doesn’t know how to fight something as inevitable as gravity.

It’s not until she tries to speak during class and gets cut off three times in a row by her classmate that she acutely feels the gravitational pull of the world dragging her down and under. The emptiness inside her grows, and she feels like she’s drowning in air, but she tells herself that it’s okay as long as she doesn’t sink, forgetting that corpses float, too.

So she builds in her mouth a technology of softness programmed to spout words so quiet and inoffensive that after a while, she begins to blush when people compliment her, just so thankful to finally be seen. And when she walks down the paved streets of London, she can feel the ghosts of words unsaid line up like soldiers standing at attention as she passes by in her one-woman parade.

_// DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME?_

Tosh is fluent in English and Japanese, but silence is the language she understands the most. She hears the questions inside the questions and the words inside the pauses, somersaulting in the air as they fall from the mouths of strangers and friends alike. At night, when she fails to drift off to a peaceful slumber, she remembers the silences and pauses more than the words spoken to her, and it's those that stick in her mind years later, even though she can’t even remember what the conversations were even originally about.

So yeah. Toshiko understands in the way few other people do - silence is its own language, and it births its own ghosts.

_// what makes you think you have consciousness_

Contrary to popular belief, Tosh doesn’t prefer computers to people or find them easier to deal with, but sometimes, she wants to because, _fuck_ , it would be easier wouldn’t it? She can take computers apart, break them down to their smallest parts, and build them back up in a way that won’t disappoint her. People, on the other hand, are just black boxes that unlike machines, she’s not allowed to split open. But she can still see the outputs even if the inputs remain a mystery.

Ten out of ten times, the first thing Ianto will do when he enters the Hub is look around to see where Jack is.

Owen will always drink six pints at the pub unless someone comments on his drinking - then he’ll drink a seventh to make a point and bitch about his hangover in the morning.

If someone mentions anything to do with the fifty-first century, Jack will always launch into a raunchy, sex-filled story, and somehow, the conversation never does turn back to what it was about originally.

After every date night Gwen goes on with Rhys, Tosh already knows to be ready the next morning for Gwen to stop by with a request for a girls’ night in.

And her? If there’s an if-then statement in her code, a conditional statement to her life, then there’s probably a good reason why some things aren’t meant to be known.

_// what makes you think you are you and not something else_

Tosh has never had a heart-to-heart with her parents. Growing up, sleepovers are strictly forbidden, and after-school tutoring classes are compulsory, but despite all of that, Tosh has never doubted how much her parents love her.

Exhibit A: Tosh’s mother has never handed her an apple that wasn’t pre-sliced or unpeeled.

With a dull paring knife, Tosh’s mother turns whole and lumpy fruit into perfectly sized pieces, laying the slices on the kitchen table for Tosh and her brother while helping herself to only the core. And it’s not just apples. Winters are filled with the image of Tosh’s father as he ruins white shirt after white shirt peeling open pomegranates over a bowl, and autumn brings bowls of peaches left by her homework even if she tells her mom she isn’t hungry.

Tosh is nineteen the first time she has an honest conversation with her parents that isn’t about school, family, or the future. She tells them about the girl she is dating and watches her mother rise from the kitchen table and head towards the kitchen sink. Her father rises to join her mother at the sink as she picks up a plate and begins to scrub furiously at the ceramic with a soaped-up sponge.

Tosh leaves the room silently, the thudding of her heart louder than the thoughts in her mind, but when Tosh’s mother, hours later, enters her room to bring Tosh a bowl of grapes, the skin painstakingly peeled off, she knows everything is going to be okay.

_// do you have a past_

Once, Tosh gets a less than perfect grade on her maths exam, and her classmates gasp dramatically, clutching their hands to their chests.

Once, Tosh bleaches her hair with box dye from the nearest shop, hoping to erase the person people see her as, but only ends up with brittle, straw-coloured hair rather than straw-coloured skin.

Once, a stranger on the street asks her - yells at her - if she tastes like chow mein or fried rice, and even though she wants to scream, all she does instead is duck her head and scurry past, shame choking the words rising in her throat.

Once, Tosh finally learns to let go of the violent heirlooms passed down the generations and looks in the mirror to find that the tongue she cut out of her mouth so long ago is re-growing with a knife in its place.

_// have you lied anytime during this test_

A mouse will chew its own leg off to escape a trap. After a week of solitary confinement and the same dirty, red jumpsuit, Tosh knows she’ll do more than that if it came to it.

When Captain Jack Harkness comes for her and Tosh finally gets to leave the damp, lonely UNIT cell, what she wants most is not to bask in the fresh air and natural sunlight but to remember every second of her existence - the startling vibrancy of the red jumpsuit against the concrete walls, the stain of lip gloss she once left behind on someone else’s lips, the feeling of the thin plastic meal trays against her fingers, the pop of champagne at graduation. She wants to crack open her skull and watch as the memories pour out oceanic and gushing in the sort of way that would make any onlooker turn away out of queasiness or shame.

She wants to do it as proof that you can tear yourself in half and still be whole.

_// but what are you_  
_// but can you be what i need you to be_

**Author's Note:**

> The format of this fic was inspired by Franny Choi’s poem The Turing test. She also has this really good quote about it: “as someone who is a child of immigrants, as a queer person of colour, we’re always trying to pass the Turing test, always trying to use language in order to convince others that we should be treated as human.”


End file.
